Beer is good; good beer is better

Tuesday night’s a good night in our neighborhood because down at the Sixth Street Bar & Grill, draft beers are just $2. (OK, a Guinness is $2.50, but still … ) Recently, I took an outdoor table with neighbor and beer lover Steve Mack to talk about the blog. We had 20 beers to choose from. I ordered a Harp; he had Stella Artois.

“Once you’ve had good beer, you can’t go back,” Steve told me. The problem with so many big-name beers, is that they’re “made by accountants and chemical engineers.”

From there, it didn’t take long to find a good topic to kick off the blog: the lack of brew pubs in Houston.

In 1995, when I moved into the Rice Village, there was a brew pub across the street from my apartment. Out on Richmond, the Houston Brewery and the Rock Bottom Brewery were both in business. They’re all gone now, as is another little brewery in the Village, the Bank Draft.

In fact, the only brew pub operating in Houston right now is the chain Two Rows, also in the Village. Great as it is, our Saint Arnold Brewery, by law, is not a place where you can buy a beer and watch a ball game. From the brewery’s FAQs:

Can I buy beer directly from the brewery?

Sorry, Texas alcohol laws prohibit us from selling beer directly to the public. But, there are grocery stores and liquor stores across the whole state who proudly serve Saint Arnold beers and root beer!

But Texas law isn’t the only issue. Check out the Brewpub Finder. It shows Austin having six active brew pubs. Fewer than a million people live in all of Travis County; we’ve got more than that in our suburbs. More than 2 million of us are packed inside the city limits.

So how can there not be a market here for fine craft beers? If anything, as the local beer blog allgoodbeer.com points out, the market is expanding.

Although the increase from last year was not as large as past increases, it occurred while the economy was spiraling downward and craft beer prices were increasing. An indication that consumers are continuing to choose quality over quantity. Hopefully that trend will continue despite the rather dismal economic outlook for this year. Fortunately, most hops have had a significant drop in price recently, which will lower costs and help smaller breweries ride out any downturn in the craft beer market.